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Nearly one in three UK bosses admit they have or would reject a female job applicant because they suspect she ‘might start a family soon’.

Although this form of employment discrimination is unlawful, 15 per cent anonymously admitted that they had broken sex discrimination laws.

The new research of 501 bosses of SMEs, carried out by law firm Slater and Gordon, also revealed that one in four bosses have rejected or would reject a woman, simply because she was a single parent.

A further 29 per cent said they have discounted or would discount a woman for a job role because she had young children and 28 per cent said they have or would because she was recently engaged or married.

Shockingly 37 per cent of bosses admitted they would advertise positions for men only if the law allowed, with 40 per cent saying they perceived men as being more committed to their jobs.

The research shows the female workforce is still facing significant levels of discrimination when it comes to juggling a career and motherhood.

More than a third of senior decision makers said they would rather hire a man to get around the issue of offering maternity leave.

Sadly, 14 per cent of all the bosses surveyed, admitted they do not do a thing to support mothers when coming back to work, after being on maternity leave.

And 36 per cent said they think ‘women are more of a future investment risk’ than men.

Remziye Ozcan, employment lawyer at Slater and Gordon, said:

The extent of discrimination exposed in this research is shocking. I come across many individual cases of women encountering sex and maternity discrimination but to see in black and white the full extent of the problem is really worrying.

Women may suspect they’ve been discriminated against at job interviews, but in many cases they will never know for sure. Now this research shows that it’s not paranoia it’s in fact prejudice and discrimination, which is still deeply entrenched in the workforce and something that women face every day.

Our survey exposes the number of bosses who are willing to admit to their prejudices- in an anonymous capacity – suggesting the real number is likely to be far higher.

It is not only illegal but also totally counterproductive if bosses refuse to entertain a woman’s job application, regardless of her experience, skill set or qualifications, simply because they feel she might have a child soon because it excludes so much talent and expertise from a workforce.

A huge shift in attitudes still needs to take place before women feel they are not penalised for wanting both a career and children. Men are never asked to choose between the two. This discrimination also affects women generally, those who don’t plan to have children or already have children, as it is about attitudes and stereotypes applied to women generally.

Over one in three said they actively try to recruit men or women who already have children so they don’t have to worry about staff going on maternity leave.

Although negative attitudes are still held by some, 65 per cent of all the 501 bosses surveyed said they do offer flexible working hours to support mothers when they are coming back to work.

More than half (53 percent) said they allow mothers to take time off to look after their children if they’re sick and 48 per cent said they keep lines of communication open whilst they are on maternity leave.

WiC Comment

Until men start to demand paternity leave and share equally childcare responsibilities this (maybe not so) “hidden” discrimination will, sadly, continue. And to discover that 28 per cent said they have or would not hire a woman because she was recently engaged or married is, in this day and age, unbelievable.

Businesses are hiring more interns, increasing their salaries, investing in quality programmes and working harder to bring them back as employees.

Employers hired 6% more interns in 2018

94% of employers encourage interns to return as employees

57% of interns offered jobs on graduate schemes

87% of interns who are offered jobs accept

Institute of Student Employers (ISE) Internship Report surveyed 107 employers who invested at least £13 million to recruit 7,532 paid interns this year. Internship opportunities were available in all UK regions with 52% of vacancies outside of London.

While median salaries rose by 1% to £350 per week, a quarter of employers pay at least £408 per week and 21% of employers pay their interns a salary equivalent to £21,500 (median starting salary for all UK graduates according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency).

As well as increasing the volume of internships, employers are broadening their offer. Employers have historically offered opportunities to penultimate year university students on fixed summer programmes. This year 62% did not restrict their internships to penultimate year students and 30% of employers hired first year students as interns, up from 22% in 2017.

Internships provide a viable route to a graduate job with 74% of employers making a job offer straight away after the internship has finished and one in ten offering a financial incentive.

Seventy per cent of employers said that interns out-perform graduates in some way with 35% stating that interns perform better on the job and 18% said that former interns stay longer.

Stephen Isherwood, Chief Executive of the ISE said:

The market for interns is getting more competitive, so employers are investing more than ever before. The reason for this is simple: interns make better hires. Former interns are more likely to accept job offers, stay longer and often outperform their peers.

This highlights the importance of internships to employability. Students need to be aware that competition for programmes has intensified, but there are more paid opportunities out there. There are lots of ways that students can engage with employers from social media to on campus, but they will need to be prepared for the selection process, which is thorough and can involve assessment centres, psychometric tests and video interviews.

For some time, Totum has seen more women making headway at leadership levels in business services functions in law. But we are delighted to now be able to put some figures behind what we know from our experience of working with talented business women in the legal sector. These show that more women are being shortlisted and placed at law firms, and in more senior roles.

At Totum, we focus on business services teams in law. This includes roles across all levels of seniority in BD & marketing, HR, IT and finance functions, as well as other cross-functional roles in areas like project and process management, innovation and change. A fair bit of our work and time is spent on ‘retained’ projects – this is where a law firm exclusively selects Totum to work on a particular role or roles. These projects are conducted on a retained basis, because they tend to be more complex and difficult to source – they are generally, therefore, more senior.

Our findings

We conducted research into the retained projects we’ve worked on over the past three years – since 2015. In this time, our retained work distribution split across roles as follows: Director (45%), Head of (28%), COO/CEO/CFO type roles (20%), Manager (5%) and Executive (2%). As you can see, retained projects tend to favour more leadership roles.

But what is really interesting is how many women are now getting shortlisted and placed in these jobs. We already knew from our diversity statistics that we enjoy an equal gender balance among our candidates, if not slightly weighted towards women, with 56% female and 44% male candidates in 2017. But this research has found the numbers of women rising in our retained work too. So, while in 2015/16, only 23% of shortlisted candidates for retained roles were women, in 2016/17 this figure rose to 44% and for 2017/18, it was up again by three percentage points to 47%. Nearly even-stevens with men.

Not only that but more women are also being placed in these roles. Back in 2015/16, we had a 70:30 ratio of men getting placed in these positions compared to women; this flipped to a 43:57 ratio in favour of women in 2016/7, and we now have a perfect 50:50 balance in 2017/18. This is fantastic news and something to be celebrated.

Role modelling the future

A great example of women getting ahead in law is Sadia Baron, Chief Marketing Officer at Reed Smith, who is also featured as a case study on our leadership microsite (www.totumleadership.com). She joined Reed Smith in 2013 as Director of Marketing, EMEA, but before long she had taken on a second job as well – as Director of the BD function for the firm’s Business and Finance function. When she became CMO in September 2016, it was the logical culmination of her huge input over the past three years. But it was also an example of how doors are increasingly opening to talented women who want to make an impact at the highest levels of this fast-changing profession.

Yes, we know we have some way to go yet. Women lawyers still lag behind men in achieving partnership in the legal profession. And law firms still need to work on delivering the kind of workplace flexibility that women often need to stay within the profession, and to advance and work at the highest levels – and that goes for business services professionals and lawyers.

But things are changing – and in business services functions, particularly fast. We are delighted to have been able to work with so many talented women who are taking the lead and changing the legal sector from within.

If you would like more information on Totum please visit our website where you will also find a number of roles at all levels.

The exit interview is a dying breed at a time when so many questions are being asked about how to retain the best talent, how to increase diversity at all levels in organisations and how to engage the younger generations just entering the job market with a different set of expectations and approaches.

So much of the people management in organisations is now being delivered electronically which takes out a crucial opportunity to really understand what makes people stay in your organisation – and why do they leave.

When this is applied to women, it is particularly important, as during their tenure many women fear calling out any potential discriminatory practices or behaviours for fear of staining their reputation in their industry. This leads organisations down a slippery path – your women leave the organisation and you may never find out why, yet you can almost guarantee that those reasons will come out eventually and if they contain any kind of misogyny or sexism, the reputation of your organisation can get tarnished before you even know it is happening.

The power of movements such as #TimesUp originate from women’s frustration at not having a supportive platform to communicate the behaviour and treatment that they have been exposed to. When given that opportunity, it is clear that there are deep seated and embedded discriminatory practices that go unchallenged and these only come to light by providing a safe supportive environment where women feel that what they say will be used positively and most critically – acted upon.

If you are leaving an organisation, leaving the industry entirely, or maybe stopping any economic activity, it is still vital that you feel heard about your experiences there, and that may not happen through the standard leaver processes followed by so many businesses.

If your business no longer uses exit interviews, maybe believing that there was nothing of value in them, then your process wasn’t asking the right questions, or interpreting the answers correctly. Instead there is a missed opportunity in the lack of analysis of valuable data that may contain the secret to attracting and retaining a talented pool of women critical to your business’ future success.

Stay engaged until the very last minute with each employee and learn how to get better at making them not want to leave.

Deborah Gray, one of three founding Directors at Totum Partners considers why gender statistics in the legal sector may not be revealing the whole story of how women are impacting the profession.

Women still have some way to go to be fairly and equally represented in the workplace. As the recent publication of gender pay gap figures go to show, there are issues across sectors – although some fair better than others. Financial services and construction, for instance, have particularly large gender pay gaps, but law firms are not far behind, and that’s when the figures do not include partner pay – add that into the mix and the percentages at many firms soar.

Useful though these statistics are, however, they don’t reveal some of the specific trends underlying the data. Here at Totum, for example, we specialise in the recruitment of business services professionals into the legal sector. We cover all functions – marketing, finance, HR and IT, as well as newly emerging teams that don’t always sit neatly in the traditional organisational structure, such as project management, innovation, pricing and risk.

We know that law firms struggle to retain female lawyers at more senior levels – hence the large pay gaps when partner numbers are included. While women made up 48% of lawyers in law firms in 2017, just 33% of partners were women. At the largest firms, that figure dropped to just 29%.

But in our business services area of law, women are doing far better. In the early part of 2018, we spent some time collating our diversity statistics for Totum activity through 2017. While in keeping with most UK businesses, we know that more can be done to promote diversity, in areas including ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation and disability.

But we were particularly pleased that our statistics show that of thecandidates that signed up with us from 1 January to 31 December 2017, 56% were female and 44% male. This is also reflected in our personal experience both at application and placement stage. Since we made our first placements into business services functions in law over 20 years ago, we have seen a steady rise in the number of women joining the profession across all business services functions.

Women in business services are also making headway at more senior levels – in ‘head of’ and director business services roles. In the work where we are retained by clients to make a placement (typically the more senior roles), the numbers of women we placed in 2017 was 50% and in 2016 was 57%. In addition, whilst we find that more men on average are shortlisted for these roles than women, the actual placement figures are more evenly proportioned. The takeaway? Given a chance, women often pip men to the post?

We know that much more needs to be done. The legal profession must work harder to retain talented women at more senior levels across the board, and particularly in their partnership ranks. But in our line of work, we have been privileged to see a pattern emerging – of increased numbers of talented women making a huge impact on the growth and sophistication of business services in law.

Such an example is at Reed Smith, where two of the ‘Chief’ roles are taken by women: Sadie Baron is the firm’s Global Chief Marketing Officer and Lucy Dillon the Chief Knowledge Officer. We want to see more of this – if only because we know that women in the board room make a real and positive difference to business (a CBI event we recently attended highlighted that a woman in the boardroom reduces the chances of bankruptcy by 20%!).

We take pride in playing our part in changing the perception that law only favours white British men. Because increasingly this isn’t the case. More options for women in law are opening up at all levels of seniority, but also on more flexible terms too. Yes, law has some catching up to do here against other sectors – some traditions die hard. But we see more firms willing to negotiate flexible contracts – part-time, working-from-home, flexible hours or other such arrangements. There is increased understanding that this is how firms will retain talented women who typically take the lion’s share of the care when children are born.

So, yes, the journey is far from over. But nor do the statistics tell the whole story. For women interested in career opportunities in law, there are many positive avenues to explore.

If you would like more information on Totum please visit our website where you will also find a number of roles at all levels.